Green-card Marine

CNN

TWENTY-NINE PALMS, California (CNN) -- U.S. Marine Lance Cpl. Mario Ramos-Villalta flashes a broad smile from beneath his camouflage cap as he talks about the country he loves and why he became a Marine.

He's fought twice in Iraq and survived an attack on his Humvee in October 2005. Now, he's preparing for deployment to Afghanistan.

Yet he's not even an American. He's a citizen of El Salvador serving in the U.S. military.

"A lot of the papers I get [say], 'You're a great American,'" the 22-year-old Purple Heart recipient says. "I am not an American citizen yet, but I still fight for it."

He adds, "Sometimes, I do get depressed about still not being a U.S. citizen and going over there."

Ramos-Villalta isn't alone. He is one of an estimated 20,500 "non-U.S. citizens" -- dubbed "green-card warriors" -- serving in the military.

In the case of Ramos-Villalta, he says it's been a painstaking process because he's been deployed to war; he was wounded in action; and is now training for a third combat deployment, leaving him little time to deal with the paperwork and lawyers needed to file for citizenship.

"It's frustrating and sometimes I get real sad about it," he says. "There is nothing I can do about it. I mean it's not up to the military. It's up to Immigration Services."

Paperwork? Lawyers? Fuck that shit. This kid has bled for this country. It makes no difference that he did it in a criminal war. Youngsters don't know much or care about that. He is doing his best, and it sounds like he's doing it well.

Give these 'green-card warriors' their citizenship papers when they graduate from recruit training. If they're willing to fight for us, they should get instant citizenship if they want it.

'Semper Fi' my ass. Just more bureaucratic bungling sung to the tune of 'support the troops'. Shameful.

Passing time by passing gas

Some days, ya just run across interesting fun stuff...

The Body Odd (MSNBC)

Dr. Billy Goldberg: The past eight weeks of my life have revolved around gas. On Jan. 22, I welcomed my second child into the world, a beautiful baby girl. It didn’t take long to realize that she was gassy like her daddy. In the wee hours of the morning when she was wailing from overwhelming intestinal distress, I had a revelation. I came to realize that we can mark the different stages of our life by how we handle our flatulence.

My poor little newborn desperately needed to let one rip. This is how we begin our life, unable to get them out.

I suppose it logically follows then that we will end our lives in a constant aromatic green cloud, largely, er, unattended.

On the other hand, what if a person willfully, premeditatedly, and with malice aforethought, renders himself potently flatulent? What if a middle-school student loads up, before school, on a breakfast of beans, broccoli, Brussels sprouts and sauerkraut? Can he then claim that the farting was something that couldn’t be helped, that it was “an accident.”

But there’s an even more profound philosophical and legal question to ponder. And that is: should farting constitute a mode of constitutionally protected free speech? If not, what necessarily privileges one orifice (the mouth) above another (the anus)?

Is there some overarching moral imperative that justifies society’s anathematization of the fart? By what usurpation of basic liberty can the state proscribe the natural expressiveness of the sphincter and the anus? In other words, can a fart be “art”?

Heh. Just call me "Rembrandt". Or "Jimi Hendrix"...

The Bush-Cheney Grand Finale of Destruction

BuzzFlash Editor's Blog

Amidst the passionate and contentious Democratic primary, all of us may have taken our eyes off the pending possibility that Bush and Cheney kicked Fallon aside to replace him with a politically-malleable military leader who will go along with nuking Iran.

That may be the final shock and awe that this monstrous administration will leave us with before they exit stage right.

Such an action -- dropping nukes on Iran -- may lead to a conflagration that will finally satisfy the End Times prayers of John Hagee and Tim LaHaye.

God help us all.

I wouldn't put it past those bastards. I hope - pray - there's someone with balls enough to stop them.

Just a thought ...

Before I head out.

If you have been watching the Dow closings lately, you'll notice the only 'up' days are days when the Fed takes action.

Now, I've worked on everything over the past 35 years, from lawnmowers to jets, and I know when something is broken. The banking/credit/investment industry is broken. Look at it like this:

A car comes in to me on the hook (it was brought in on a tow truck, not running). I push it into the shop and determine the fuel pump is shot. Am I gonna push it back out until the part gets here? Yeah, right. I'm gonna undo a vacuum line on the intake manifold and find an aerosol can of something flammable. I'm gonna put the Indian or Sam behind the wheel and tell them to start it while I'm spraying my ass off and we're gonna drive that car out into a parking space, me running along side. Human fuel injector.

Ladies and gentlemen, the Fed is the idiot with the aerosol can running along side the car. Without that constant spray, the market ain't gonna run. The can is just about empty. We got problems.

Off to fix the shit I can fix ...

Devil with a blue dress, revisited ...

I did a double-take when I heard it this morning:

When you read this story, you have to play back in your mind the vision of Brian Ross getting the release of Hillary Clinton's personal First Lady schedule, flipping through his heavily dog-eared copy of the Starr Report, and studiously matching up dates. All the while approving the clip art of the semen-stained dress and Lewinsky, making sure it all fit in the frame, etc. [Brain bleach*, please - F.]

You could bust a guy for sexual deviancy just for the work it took to produce this swill.

...

So, what was the first Mrs. McCain doing the first time 'Big' John started cheating on her with the current Mrs. McCain? Just askin' ...

Bruce Springsteen & The E Street Band - Devil with a Blue Dress medley

*Not for Hil or Monica, but the vision of Brian Ross with his pants around his ankles, flogging himself furiously.

Clueless ...

Stolen from bluegal.

These are the days ...

I wish I worked in an office. Heh ...

Starting Our 6th Year Of Lies

Two good articles in a Limey rag:

Patrick Cockburn

This is the war that started with lies, and continues with lie after lie after lie

It has been a war of lies from the start. All governments lie in wartime but American and British propaganda in Iraq over the past five years has been more untruthful than in any conflict since the First World War.

Mr Cheney was back in Baghdad this week, five years later almost to the day, to announce that there has been "phenomenal" improvements in Iraqi security. Within hours, a woman suicide bomber blew herself up in the Shia holy city of Kerbala, killing at least 40 and wounding 50 people. Often it is difficult to know where the self-deception ends and the deliberate mendacity begins.

There was never any 'self-deception'. It was a lie from the beginning, and it started in the OVP and the Oval Office. Nothing's changed.

And this one on 'supporting the troops' by Mark Steel:

But more important, what a strange idea that the only true way to support someone is to cheer them into a situation that's likely to get them killed. If these "supporters" ever find themselves looking up at a tower block, with someone 15 floors up threatening to jump off the balcony as friends delicately try to coax him back, they must shout, "Don't undermine him – it's up to all of us to support him – jump, man, jump! Go on – here's Zoe, 22 from Clacton in a G-string and paratrooper's cap. She supports you, so dive!"

Inevitably, once the supported boys started returning from war with bits missing, the governments and newspapers that backed them most enthusiastically decide that they're an embarrassing nuisance. Then their attitude becomes like that of the First World War general who, when he visited a hospital full of soldiers back from the Somme with shell shock, shouted, "Why are you shivering? Only drunkards and masturbators freeze." This must be what causes so many old people to conk out from hypothermia every winter, the filthy minxes.

Speaking as an old drunk who may possibly have masturbated a time or two, that explains a lot...

Please read the rest.

A Discussion On Racial Issues

In case you've been, er, away, and missed Senator Obama's speech on race in America, here's a video and transcript.

There's no dearth of opinion on the speech, but here's the one that counts. Mine. By being frank and speaking to us as if we were adults, the splib dude knocked it out of the park.

Here's a funny microcosm:



More here.

If Avedon ran the world ...

It wouldn't be such a bad place:

...I could probably get rich betting that Team Bush will not do one single thing that could have any positive impact on the situation. But if I was running the world, I'd restore all those regs everyone's been getting rid of for the last 30 years, get rid of the Bush tax shift, and start a government employment program that would put everyone to work who wants to be (on a real salary), rebuilding our infrastructure and undoing as much of the Bush damage as possible ...

Late for work ...

5 years on ...

Well, it's been five years since the balloon went up on the Iraq fiasco.

After five years, all we have to show for it are 4000 American dead, tens of thousands wounded, and a military well on its way to breaking.

We have killed, wounded, and displaced millions of Iraqis.

We have destroyed a goodly portion of the Iraqi infrastructure, forcing those people to live as they did in the Dark Ages.

Chaos prevails where once there was order and a generation (maybe more than one) of Iraqis will never be able to lead a normal life.

We have alienated much of the world and destroyed our reputation as peacemaker.

We have spent ourselves into monumental debt and a financial crisis.

As for the objectives laid out before the war, all were proved to be lies. We have learned over the past 5 years that there was absolutely no reason for us to invade that nation.

WMD? No.

Al-Qaeda? No.

Freedom and democracy? Not hardly.

Ladies and gentlemen, five years into World War Two, major combat operations were over and we were already working to set up stable governments in Europe and Asia.

The Korean War, five years in, was over and the new government in Seoul was functioning, the bombed out infrastructure well on its way to being rebuilt.

This pointless, illegal war has done nothing but destroy the American brand, turn the nation into a laughingstock, and piss away our wealth and blood. We have not only committed war crimes, and sanctioned them, and shaken the foundations this nation was founded on, but we have allowed the perpetrators to remain free and continue their reign of terror. It says we approve of what Bush has done in our name.

We have become no better than those we have come to despise, criminals, despots, and tyrants. To be an American today means you are stained with the blood of innocents and are judged by the actions of a moronic simpleton. To be an American today means you care nothing for the rights of others if they don't serve your own interests. To be an American today means not very much.

After five years of illegal, immoral war, we have done more damage to this nation than at any time in the last century. It will take us decades to repair the damage we have caused and the war should not last a day longer. We cannot afford to pay the cost, be it exacted in blood or money.

Pic thanks to HuffPo.

Five years on, we've hit the iceberg while the leadership is shouting for the stewards to rearrange the deck chairs and for the band to play on. The rest of us are running for the lifeboats. It's time to end it and bring our people home.

This is what we're liable to get as president...

Think Progress

Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) has spent a majority of his presidential campaign trying to convince voters that he is the most qualified to tackle foreign policy issues:

Speaking to reporters in Amman, the Jordanian capital, McCain said he and two Senate colleagues traveling with him continue to be concerned about Iranian operatives “taking al-Qaeda into Iran, training them and sending them back.”

Pressed to elaborate, McCain said it was “common knowledge and has been reported in the media that al-Qaeda is going back into Iran and receiving training and are coming back into Iraq from Iran, that’s well known. And it’s unfortunate.” A few moments later, Sen. Joseph Lieberman, standing just behind McCain, stepped forward and whispered in the presidential candidate’s ear. McCain then said: “I’m sorry, the Iranians are training extremists, not al-Qaeda.”

McCain, the so-called foreign policy expert, is confusing reports that Iran was aiding Shiite insurgents in Iraq — one of the groups that virulently opposes al Qaeda. Even some aspects of those reports have been disputed.

Considering he had to correct McCain himself, does Lieberman still insist that McCain is “almost always right on the big issues in foreign policy”?

Jesus Effing Christ! How wrong do you have to be in your 'foreign policy expertise' to be corrected by Lieberman?!!!

Living a Republican War In Iraq

CNN's Kyra Phillips speaks to some Iraqi soldiers about the U.S. presidential election and democracy in Iraq and finds no support for McCain.



Some observations:

First, the Iraqi EMs are as smart as ours. This comes as no surprise.

Second, they're as divided about our Democratic presidential candidates as we are. Heh.

And third, if Kyra wishes to find McCain supporters, she needs to interview al Qaeda.

Absolutely, Postively 100% Politically Incorrect Quote of the Day Revisited And Then Some

Expanding on my own post, here's Tracy Morgan's whole bit at Crooks and Liars. Some snippets:

[...] Let me tell you something, Barack knows how to answer that phone. He’s not going to answer it like, (soft, frightened voice) “Hello, I’m scared. What’s going on?” He is gonna answer it like I would get a phone call at 3 in the morning: “Yeah, who’s this? This better be good or I’m going to come down there and put somebody in a wheelchair.”

3 AM, shit. I'm like that after 7:30 PM. Call me at 3 AM, my house better be on fire, cuz if it ain't, yours is about to be...

[...] People saying he’s not a fighter. Let me tell you something. He’s a gangsta, he’s from Chicago. Barack is not winning because he’s a black man. If that was the case, I would be winning. And I’m way blacker than him. I used to smoke Newports and drink Olde English. I grew up on government cheese, I prefer it. [...]

So these two guys go down to the post office to get some government cheese, but the line was too long so they decided to just swipe the cheese from the next person to come out. This they did, and after runnin' for a while, they stopped and compared their loot.

"I got American cheese. What kind you get?"

"I got nacho cheese."

"How d'ya know?"

"Well, when I grabbed it, they guy hollered, 'Hey! That's nacho cheese!'"

(rimshot)

Sorry, my BP meds are makin' me dizzy...

Double Standard II

Expanding on Fixer's post, this from one who actually did it. HuffPo.

Obama's Minister Committed "Treason" But When My Father Said the Same Thing He Was a Republican Hero

When Senator Obama's preacher thundered about racism and injustice Obama suffered smear-by-association. But when my late father -- Religious Right leader Francis Schaeffer -- denounced America and even called for the violent overthrow of the US government, he was invited to lunch with presidents Ford, Reagan and Bush, Sr.

We Republican agitators of the mid 1970s to the late 1980s were genuinely anti-American in the same spirit that later Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson (both followers of my father) were anti-American when they said God had removed his blessing from America on 9/11, because America accepted gays. Falwell and Robertson recanted but we never did.

My dad's books denouncing America and comparing the USA to Hitler are still best sellers in the "respectable" evangelical community and he's still hailed as a prophet by many Republican leaders. When Mike Huckabee was recently asked by Katie Couric to name one book he'd take with him to a desert island, besides the Bible, he named Dad's Whatever Happened to the Human Race? a book where Dad also compared America to Hitler's Germany.

The hypocrisy of the right denouncing Obama, because of his minister's words, is staggering. [...]

Go read the rest of this if you have a strong stomach.

One thing I take away from this is that two diametrically opposed sides - us progressive-leaning reality-based patriotic Americans who wish to see fairness and justice for all under the law of the land, and the christofascist phony religious whackjobs - both invoke the spectre of Nazism when talking about our country for vastly different reasons.

Us, when railing against the systematic dismantling of our freedom under the Constitution, them when railing against secular freedom and wanting it to be dismantled and then doing things their way.

We're right and they're wrong, of course.

Chinese Republicans?

They sound alike:

China blames Dalai Lama for violence in Tibet

Sure. Because he has such a long history of promoting violence, unlike the Chinese government who have never been known to use excessive force against its population ...

'Healthy Forests', 'Clear Skies', 'No Child Left Behind', anyone?

Later ...

Re-logo ...

The CultureGhost (who else, heh ...) is on a mission.



If you don't know The Guys From Area 51, you should.

Off to work ...

Allotting blame ...

For this financial mess we're in. The Misfit calls it correctly:

...

This is the part where, in a just world, you would see George W. Bush and Alan Greenspan being frog-marched out to the Washington Mall to be publicly executed on the lawn in front of the Capitol, watched live by a world-wide television audience. It was more Alan Greenspan who gutted banking regulations under an ideologically driven belief, which he apparently took from the writings of Ayn Rand, that given total freedom, the market would ensure that bad things never happened. It was George W. Bush's administration that removed banks from control of state regulators and placed them under the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, an agency whose main job was the approval of the location of banking branches.

...

This is your "read the whole thing" post for the day.

Quote of the Day

'Nucks:

...

Senator Lieberman has finally molted his snake skin and emerged as a full fledged Republican, at no ones surprise, especially mine.

...

Good thing the Dems kissed his ass in '06, ain't it?

Absolutely, Postively 100% Politically Incorrect Quote of the Day

I heard this on Flaccidball. Liquid alert!:

"'Bitch' might be the new 'black', but 'black' is the new President, bitch!" - Tracy Morgan in response to Tina Fey.

Heh.